by John Crowley
7
A BADDON is Hebrew for the black angel called in Greek APOLLYON (q.v.); ABA is an angelic luminary concerned in human sexuality, who ministers to SARABOTES (q.v.), who rules the angels on Friday; but ABBA is a name for God as Father, in Aramaic the equivalent of papa.
Pierce Moffett had had two fathers, a first and a second. The one in Brooklyn where he had been born, and the other in the country into which the first had sent him or allowed him to be carried, northeastern Kentucky. His uncle Sam, in whose bedroom Pierce had concealed the girl-child he and his cousins had found.
He turned pages.
DYNAMIS, in Gnostic angelology, one of the seven Æons who procreated the superior Angels. The chief male personification of Power, as Pistis SOPHIA (q.v.) is of Wisdom.
Closed in the big closet on the second floor of the Bondieu house, smelling of mothballs and fur. She turning the pages, he reading the words. They looked for pictures, they knew which ones. It’s not only the WITCHES and the DEVIL who are naked (his hooked or corkscrew penis displayed) but all the GODS too, a calm Hindu DEVA lifting her orbed breasts, APOLLO and HERMES and the ithyphallic SATYR, and VENUS covering herself, her hand like EVE’s broad leaf, showing and hiding at once. Outside the closet door his cousin Bird whispering urgently through the keyhole to them, what are you doing, what are you doing.
She was a little sharp-faced girl of about his own age then, ten or nine, but far smaller, quick and stringy. He remembered—just then remembered them, lifted them as from an archæological dig, brushed away the dust—her cracked patent-leather shoes, and the way she had walked her socks down beneath her heels, her dirty white anklets; the gray cold hard tendons of her ankles. What though had her name been; what had they done to her there, he and his cousins, tormented her somehow or overcome her, used her, saved her. Not saved her.
She had no mother. He remembered that. Neither had his cousins. But she had been his secret, she and what they did together; the first of that kind of secret he had ever entered into, Rose Ryder being the last or latest. As though he climbed a spiral track up a mountain, he saw that he had come to the same place where he had once stood, only one turn higher up. He could see himself now, down there on a former turn, in his own room in that house, bent over a book, this book or another; he could look with pity down upon himself, at the back of his big shorn head, the vulnerable tendons of his neck. When we can look at ourselves thus in the past, as though we were spirit revenants, chances are we are inventing; Pierce knew that. He only didn’t know which way he ought to step, which sight he ought to see. For he was under a compunction to invent the past that had indeed occurred, the one that led to this present, its original and its imago; unless he could do that he would never exit from this, would never sleep again.
Sam Oliphant’s dead wife’s diamond ring, in its tiny box of convolute rose velvet. Its empty box. Did she steal that stone? Or was it he? Something happened to it that caused Pierce to be bound over to Sam and punished. It was for her sake that he’d done it, if he had, and even under duress and suffering he had not told; he had not told.
A task, his task, begun in the past and left undone or refused or forgotten, that must or might be completed in the present, in another form, for another’s sake. Not for his own sake, no, he didn’t think so: not something buried in his flesh and needing to be removed, like the wounds that psychiatrists say we go on licking all our lives until we heal them in the remembering of them: not for his sake, nor for that little girl’s, for whom he had actually done his best maybe possibly, anyway had done what he had done. No not for her sake, or even for Rose’s.
For whose sake then?
SHEKHINA, according to Kabbalah the spark of divinity present in the world. Often pictured as lost, unknown, despised or unrecognized. Sometimes conceived of as identical to the HOLY SPIRIT or WISDOM. In alchemy it is most often a stone or a jewel, the lapis exulis, stone of our exile, to be found or made by the perfect philosopher. See also GRAIL.
Now afternoon was fading, another brief winter day Pierce had not seen pass. At this gray hour sometimes, as at dawn, he had been able to sleep for a time, but only if he forbore his bed, sat up in his chair in his clothes as though awake. He lost consciousness briefly, but dreamed only of the room he sat in, and the book he held in his lap; and found it still there when he awoke.
It was the lights of a car that awakened him, and a dog’s bark, and the thud of the car’s door. He struggled upright, to meet what he had to meet, whatever it was; and the door was knocked on.
“Pierce, it’s Rosie,” Rosie called at the door. “Can I come in?”
“I was out, that’s all,” Rosie said. “Out and about, paying calls. If you hadn’t been here I’d have gone over to Val’s maybe. Or.”
She wore a rumpled raincoat over a woolly shirt not probably her own originally, and a crocheted hat from some other era of her life. It occurred to Pierce that she did not herself look so hot, but he didn’t know if he could trust his perceptions; almost everything he looked at was getting uglier steadily, or sadder, or weaker.
“So,” she said. On the floor by his chair she spied the Dictionary of Deities, Dæmons and Devils of Mankind, and bent to pick it up. “Hey, I know this book.”
“Oh yes?”
“Val’s taken it out before. She read to me out of it. About—I forget exactly. Plato and love. About Eros, who’s a little boy, he says.”
“Yes.”
“Was it Plato who said we’re originally one being, male and female, and then get separated in two?”
“Well. Self and beloved other. Not necessarily male and female.”
“Ah-ha,” she said, flipping pages. “It was in that stupid poem you found. Which I actually read.” She sampled the air, as her dog had done. “You know, you need to do your laundry,” she said.
“It’s far. The one in Stonykill finally closed. Nasty place, good riddance, but still.”
“Come on over to the house. We have this machine you won’t believe. The kind where you can watch the wash go around through a little porthole. Sam loves squatting in front of it; she says it’s like TV.”
“I’m not good company, Rosie. I don’t know if I’m up to driving.”
“I’ll take you. And bring you back soon. You can tell me what you’ve been thinking. Tell me all about devils and angels.”
“I’m swearing off thinking.”
“Aw come on,” she said, and he saw urgency in her drawn face, she hadn’t been sleeping either maybe, the whole world awake. “Come play. Commonna my house-a, my house.”
His windows were black, and the alarm clock’s short hand had not even crossed out of the left hemisphere, twelve hours and more of dark to go. A small daring awoke in him. It was only his inwardness that had been devastated, burnt-over country where no one dwelt; his exterior was whole, and needed a chat, and maybe a drink, and why not. He nodded thoughtfully, not immediately taking steps, but nodding.
So soon enough she had got him into her car with Alf and Ralph the dogs, and tossed his pillowcase of clothes in back; and, heading toward Stonykill and Arcady, she told him what had happened to her that morning: how she had lost her court case, and lost Sam to Mike, and to them.
“Oh no Rosie,” Pierce said or keened; “oh my Lord.” He grasped the top of his head, as though to keep this knowledge from cracking or splitting it.
She told him what Allan had said, that they weren’t going to get away with it, and her voice trembled with doubt or maybe (he thought) it was only fierce resolve; and he listened intently and wrote Allan’s name inwardly as an ally though he didn’t believe in his powers now as he might have once, Law and Argument and Reason. He saw Sam, reft away from her mother, and from him; from the world. The last light went out. Oh those bastards. The way ahead, lit fitfully by the walleyed headlights, seemed suddenly unfamiliar, as though he’d never travelled it before. Houses went by, dark or cheerily lit, that knew nothing of Rosie or Pierce or what had happened to them.
“If you told him,” Pierce said helplessly. “Asked him, asked him …”
“He won’t even talk about it. He already said: he can’t have her raised outside his faith. He couldn’t bear it. He said he’d do anything.” She blotted her eyes on the sleeve of her shirt. “I know Sam loves him a lot,” she said. “Probably more than she loves me. And he’s gotten to be a better father lately than he was.” The gateposts of Arcady appeared, the big house, one light lit.
“No I bet not,” Pierce said.
“He has. Nicer. Milder. Less, I don’t know, selfish.”
Pierce wanted to contradict her, but he couldn’t; Rose had grown not less selfish maybe but milder somehow, happier, there was no doubt of it.
“It’s not the end of the world,” Rosie said, coming to a stop. The wagon began the shuddering spasms it always went through when she turned it off. “People get out of these things. A lot of them do. I read in a magazine.”
“Yes. I heard that too.”
From somewhere nearby Pierce heard a sound like mocking laughter. “They come to, sort of,” Rosie said. “Snap out of it.”
Again, a weird snigger, even closer. Pierce sat upright, looking into the dark. “Just the sheep,” Rosie said. “Spofford’s sheep.”
Spofford’s sheep. Pierce remembered again the sunlit summer afternoon, a year ago August, when the bus he was riding from New York City had broken down in Fair Prospect, not ten miles from here; he had been on his way to Conurbana to apply for a job at Peter Ramus College, there where she now was earning a degree, a degree, another mask no doubt for them to do their work behind.
“I’m boarding them for him, you know. They do that all night.”
“Are they really hungry?” Pierce asked in sudden pity. “Are they okay without him? Are they? Where is he now, is he coming back, is he all right?”
Rosie told him it was okay, they were okay, and her dog Ralph barked from the back, and was answered by Spofford’s dog out in the darkness; but it was too late, Pierce was releasing strange sobs, grasping himself around the waist and brow, and she could only pat his arm and wait.
“I need,” she said. “I think I need a drink.”
“You asked her to the party?” Rosie asked him in amazement. “At the castle?”
She had found Boney’s bottle of Scotch in the bottom of the living-room cabinet, and after some hunting for something she preferred had settled for this stuff too, top of the line Pierce said but tasting to her of burning leaves. From the basement came the faint sound of almost all of Pierce’s clothes being thumped and tumbled.
“Yes.”
“Oh man,” Rosie said. “Pierce you got it bad. I didn’t know. Oh Lord.”
“Yes.”
“One sick puppy.”
“I didn’t mean for this to happen,” Pierce said. “I didn’t believe that it would. I still don’t believe it. It is just so foolish.”
“She’s not good enough for you, Pierce. Oh I don’t mean that, that’s not it, but she’s not worth this. She’s. She’s just somebody.”
“Well. So am I.”
“You know what I mean.”
He bent his head. He knew.
“So what’s that like?” Rosie asked after a moment. “To feel that so intensely.” Her smile had altered and her gaze grown more inquiring. “I never have. Really, ever.”
“Love ’em and leave ’em, huh, Rosie?”
“Well I just never did.”
“It’s not so good.” He drank. “There used to be a disease,” he said, “that people don’t seem to suffer from anymore. A disease of love. It was called amor hereos. Crazy Love.”
“Oh they still have that. But you don’t have it. Come on.”
“It was a disease that some people actually tried to catch. The knights of Provençal, or anyway the poets who wrote about them, thought there was nothing more glorious. Un Dieu en ciel, en terre une Déesse.”
Rosie worked this out. “A god in Heaven, a goddess on Earth.”
“One God in Heaven,” Pierce said. “One Goddess on Earth.”
“Oh really.”
“Sometimes those knights died of it. Really. There are cases.”
“I thought you at least went out and did good deeds,” Rosie said. “In her name.”
“Sure.”
“She sends you forth.”
“Sure.” A painful warmth started in his limbs and his breast. “My old teacher, Frank Walker Barr, used to say,” and here Pierce intoned somewhat, “that ‘in the picture-language of mythology, Woman represents all that can be known; Man is the hero who comes to know it.’”
“To know what.”
“What can be known.”
“And what if she’s not there by the time you get there to know her? What if she’s decided to be a hero herself, and go find what’s to be known?”
She drank, regarding him, so frank and interested that Pierce lowered his eyes. “Well he wasn’t talking about real men and women,” Pierce said. “He was talking about stories. Allegories in a way. He says Woman stands for.”
“Pierce,” Rosie said. “You think you can go on telling stories like that, where men come looking for women to know them, for a thousand years, and people don’t think This is about me?”
She crunched ice in her teeth. Another moment arrived in which Pierce knew that he had been wrong, all wrong, and why, and how simple it all was; and again it passed, leaving him bereft and ignorant even of why he felt bereft.
“So,” she said. “What did you come to know? By the way.”
“Oh. Oh, well. Oh jeez.” He lifted one bare foot and rubbed it in his hands, cold as a corpse’s. “You know,” he said, “One thing those old knights always had. When you were lost in the thorny wood, and didn’t know what to do next, there would always be a hermit, or a friar of orders gray, who would appear, and take you in, and tell you which way to go. Give you a tablet, or a rhyme, or a sword or a prayer. Heal your wounds.” He thought of Rhea Rasmussen, and felt his eyes fill, as though her touch could do that, even the memory of it, even if he’d right off taken another wrong turning, no fault of hers.
“Tell you what,” Rosie said, and Pierce saw that her eyes too shone, on account of his absurd dilemma, he thought, but surely not only his. “I’ll be your hermit if you’ll be mine.”
“Okay,” he said. “I will if ever I can.”
“Me too.” She rose and found the bottle again, and splashed more amber fluid in each of their glasses. “It’s a deal.”
While they drank Rosie made sandwiches and they ate them in the big comfortless kitchen, designed for help to use. Pierce tried to eat, tried to explain to Rosie about Rose Ryder.
“She needs to be swept away,” he said. “She needs it not to be up to her; she needs to be. Taken I guess. Rushed in upon.”
“By God.”
“Well ultimately.”
“Or by you.” She ate a warty pickle. “Like how?”
“Well I was supposed to know how; that was the deal. She trusted me to know.”
“Did you?”
“I picked it up.”
Rosie studied him smiling. “This was in bed.”
“Yes.”
“How far did this go?”
“Oh.” He lifted his eyes, as though to think or ponder, maybe to avoid Rosie’s. “Oh pretty far.”
“Come on,” she said. “How far?”
He tried to tell her, laying down only low cards at first, as she regarded him chin in hand. He told her more. Sometimes she laughed, or nodded in recognition.
“Yeah,” she said. “Yup. Old Rose.”
“The thing I know is,” Pierce said. “That she’s like that really. Deep deep. Maybe I’m wrong, but I don’t think I’m like that, not deep deep.” This truth turned instantly into its opposite as soon as it was said, black bird turning into the sun, and flew away.
“But she is.”
“I think.”
“Yeah,” Rosie said. “
Yeah she is.” She was nodding rhythmically in a yessirree way that made Pierce stop talking and regard her wondering, until Rosie caught his look.
“What.”
“You know this?” Pierce asked.
“Hey,” Rosie said, and got to her feet. “I’ve been to bed with her too. Oh yeah. I’ve had her.” She grinned broadly at Pierce’s face and leaned over as though to embrace him, put one hand on his shoulder and extracted his cigarettes from his pocket.
“You have?” Pierce said. “Rosie, you …”
“Yeah. She’s got a cute body.”
She held her smoke out for a light. It was her turn to talk. How last spring, not last spring but the spring before. Did Pierce know that Rose and Mike were lovers? Yes sure because that was when Pierce had first come to the county. But he’d had an old lech for her going way back, when Rosie was still Mrs. Mucho; and one night.
“What he said was, what he thought was, that this was supposed to make the marriage stronger. Make a bond between us. That we had shared this. A bond.”
She was still grinning dopily, though she wasn’t dopey; she turned the cigarette inexpertly in her fingers, enjoying it, enjoying Pierce.
“It didn’t work,” Pierce guessed.
“It’s funny,” Rosie said. “The one thought I’d never had before that night was to get a divorce. Never like considered it or toyed with the idea. But after that night—well I never even had to really think about it, it was just obvious.”
“It was that bad?”
“No. It wasn’t bad. It was”—she made a small, careless gesture with the smoking butt—“kind of fun. Kind of sweet in a creepy way.”
“Uh-huh.”
“It didn’t push me over the edge anyway. No nothing like that. It’s more like what I did instead of making a decision, or thinking things through. I mean it was making a decision, only in another—medium.” She squinted inquiringly at Pierce, are you getting this? And then, “It’s as though,” she said (or maybe thought; later on she wouldn’t remember if she’d said it aloud, if she could have), “as though our bodies and their feelings live a different life from us, that we only partly share, that we only get to look into sometimes when they do something that amazes us. Like that, getting it on with Rose, which meant it was over with Mike even though it didn’t seem to me to mean that at all. Like that. Or like finding out you love somebody enough to die, being surprised that you do. Or then not loving them anymore, and not being able to a second longer. It seems so sudden. But maybe it’s not sudden at all.”